Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: What is the worst thing about website designs?

This is topic What is the worst thing about website designs? in forum Film-Yak at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.

To visit this topic, use this URL:
https://ft-forum.com/ft/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=8;t=003890

Posted by Brad Miller (Member # 2) on 02-13-2005, 01:35 AM:

What is the most annoying thing to you? Popups? Advertisements? Really tiny navigational text links? Flash?

My personal hatred is websites with sound. [Mad]

Posted by Allison Parsons (Member # 2728) on 02-13-2005, 01:48 AM:

Web sites that have some sort of Flash trailer or what not playing and there is no 'skip' button for you to click so you dont have to watch it.

Good example: the Dreamworks exhibitor relations site has one on there now for the Ring 2 promotion. grrrr

pop-ups come in at a close second.

Posted by Nate Lehrke (Member # 1460) on 02-13-2005, 01:51 AM:

Being a dial-up user, I hate sites designed for highspeed. I mean, sites that take me three minutes to load becuase they have 20 photos and a flash intro.

But I am just complaining. It would just be stupid to cater your whole site to dial-up users since "highspeed" will be "normal speed" in just a few years.

Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 02-13-2005, 01:53 AM:

I hate sites that don't have me on them.

Posted by Scott Norwood (Member # 30) on 02-13-2005, 02:06 AM:

Flash doesn't bother me, because I don't install the plugin. I ignore web sites that aren't usable without it.

Popups don't bother me because I turn off popups.

What does bother me:

Anything not usable in Lynx (unless obviously image-oriented or something like that).

Anything that depends on Javascript for basic functionality.

Anything that doesn't use standards-compliant HTML.

Anything with blinking text or animated GIFs.

Anything with banner ads, especially if they are animated, slow-loading, or large in size.

Anything that crashes my browser.

Anything that requires "free registration" to view content (e.g. New York Times).

Anything that requires a specific HTTP_REFERER (umm...Brad...hello) to get to a specific page.

Anything where "web site" or "Web site" is spelled "website" (last I checked, "website" isn't a word).

In short, basically every commercial web site at the moment.

Posted by Brad Miller (Member # 2) on 02-13-2005, 02:17 AM:

HTTP_REFERER on websites kick ass! [Big Grin]

Posted by James Faber (Member # 2796) on 02-13-2005, 03:21 AM:

Scott, I think you got about all of them.

Posted by Brad Miller (Member # 2) on 02-13-2005, 04:33 AM:

Nope, he missed intro screens that do nothing but welcome you to the website, then you have to click through them to get where you wanted to go. [Razz]

Posted by James Faber (Member # 2796) on 02-13-2005, 04:41 AM:

Yeah, and stupid disclaimers!

Posted by David Buckley (Member # 2600) on 02-13-2005, 06:08 AM:

Clever website designers that make right-click stuff hard, like popping up a message box, or like search results on this very site where right-click, open on new tab from the search results sends you to the home page...

Posted by Brad Miller (Member # 2) on 02-13-2005, 06:10 AM:

That's because you are using an evil browser. Click here to fix that.

Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 02-13-2005, 07:52 AM:

Sites which won't work without setting cookies and which don't give you a reasonable explanation of why they need to set cookies. And ones which invite third parties to set tracking cookies which most people who don't use Firefox would have no idea are coming in annoy me especially.

Posted by Sam Graham (Member # 2889) on 02-13-2005, 10:20 AM:

The most notorious sites I hate for many of the reasons posted here are official "websites" (he said with tongue sticking out at Scott Norwood) for major movie releases.

How much flash crap do I have to go through to download a fricking movie poster?

So although I link those sites to showtimes for customers to reference, I usually go to Yahoo! Movies for images and posters...

Posted by Mike Olpin (Member # 1115) on 02-13-2005, 11:14 AM:

Ads that use Java to "Fly in" from the edge of the browser are especially annoying. I also hate the new flash banners that contain movie trailers built in.

Posted by Ken Layton (Member # 133) on 02-13-2005, 12:41 PM:

I hate Flash crap. Popups aren't too bad since I have Popup Stopper, but those damn Pop-unders keep getting thru (fastclick.net).

Posted by Jason Black (Member # 684) on 02-13-2005, 01:27 PM:

Pop-ups, (Although I'm sure Phil likes these)

Pop-unders,

Excessive Flash use

Sites that require you to *click here* then *click here* then *click here* to get to the one page you want to view.

Slow loading pages (and I'm on cable!)

Bright colored text... resulting in rentinal burn to view.

Sites without nudity... (just kidding here - I do NOT, I repeat, I DO NOT want to see Brad, Phil, Joe, TWP, or anyone else nekkit on this site!)

Posted by David Buckley (Member # 2600) on 02-13-2005, 01:28 PM:

quote: Brad Miller
That's because you are using an evil browser

Of course I'm using a evil browser, as all browsers (except Lynx) are evil. However, my choice of evil browser is (and has been for some time) Firefox, and (in cookie terms anyway) it is set up identically to the example.

In more general terms, "site optimized for firefox" is just a specific example of the evil that Scott describes as a feature list, the very concept of "site optimized for <anything>".

(And I've just checked one more time - on search result right click / open in new tab does not go where one would expect)

Posted by Randy Stankey (Member # 64) on 02-13-2005, 01:53 PM:

Sites that put up lots of pictures which don't have thumbnails!

If I'm looking for some piece of information on your site, I don't want to wait for 1,000 stupid pictures to load before I can read the page. Even if the text loads first, before the pictures, the words will jump around the page as the pictures load. Of course, I could tell the browser to wait until the page is fully loaded but then I'd wait forever to see anything at all!

I HATE sites that don't account for the fact that the majority of users are STILL dial-up! My boss tried to make me design some pages that had movies in them but he didn't think I should put in some low-speed options. I had to explain to him that dial-up takes 5-7 minutes per MB to download. (On average.) He wanted me to put up movies that were 10 MB or more! When I told him that MOST of the people who are not connected through the college network would have to wait 50 minutes or MORE to see the content he was puzzled.

When I go to a web page, I give it 10 seconds to start loading. If it takes longer than that I'm GONE! I don't imply that the page has to be DONE loading in 10 seconds. I has to be doing something that lets me know that SOMETHING is happening. I just want to be able to see enough of the site to tell if it's worth waiting for the rest of it to load. Otherwise, it's CLICK! Bye-bye!

Flash = EVIL!
Java = EVIL!
Huge pictuers & movies w/o thumbnails = EVIL!

Sites that check for USER AGENT and put up messages that say, "This site won't work unless you use <browser X>.", are EVIL! Especially when I instruct my browser to lie about its identity and then the page loads PERFECTLY! Sites that do that usually get a "Fuck You" letter from me!

Posted by Jim Ziegler (Member # 86) on 02-13-2005, 02:19 PM:

Sam, if you are looking for smaller JPGs of one sheets, you can find them on movies.yahoo.com.

Randy, a question for you. How do you make it so that a segment of a page only loads if the user is on broadband? Is there code that can detect connect speed?

Posted by Phil Hill (Member # 371) on 02-13-2005, 04:14 PM:

I LUV the word "website"...and "email" too... so c'mon Scott, get with modern times!

From the *website* Dictionary.com:

quote:
Usage Note: The transition from World Wide Web site to Web site to website seems to have progressed as rapidly as the technology itself. The development of website as a single uncapitalized word mirrors the development of other technological expressions which have tended to evolve into unhyphenated forms as they become more familiar. Thus email has recently been gaining ground over the forms E-mail and e-mail, especially in texts that are more technologically oriented. Similarly, there has been an increasing preference for closed forms like homepage, online, and printout.

quote: Jason Black
Pop-ups, (Although I'm sure Phil likes these)

Only when "we" talk Jason... hubba hubba!

(BTW: You're over limit on your M/C for all the calls to 976-PHIL.)

Posted by Brad Miller (Member # 2) on 02-13-2005, 05:47 PM:

David, hmmmmmmmmm you are right. I never tried to open a new page from the search engine. Interesting.

I don't know how he did it, but somehow this is Phil's fault! [Razz]

Posted by Phil Hill (Member # 371) on 02-13-2005, 06:19 PM:

Brad, I have magical powers...

Posted by Randy Stankey (Member # 64) on 02-13-2005, 10:42 PM:

quote: Jim Ziegler
Randy, a question for you. How do you make it so that a segment of a page only loads if the user is on broadband? Is there code that can detect connect speed?

You load a small thumbnail picture of the "poster frame" of a movie. In order to watch the movie you have to click on the picture or a text link to view/download it.

Go to the videos page on this site to see how its done.

You could also have a link somewhere in the home page of a site that allows the user to choose their dial-up/broadband preference. That preference could also be stored in a cookie.

I don't know if there is a way to automatically detect a user's network speed. One could statistically infer the user's speed by the time between clicks on links. You know how much data you're sending down the line. If you count the amount of time between a given user's responses you could simply do the math. If your pages average 1 MB of data and the user clicks on an average of one page/link per second you might infer that he can download 1 MB per second. This is strictly a guess. There could be lots of reasons why a person would click-through that quickly. Maybe he's been to your site before and knows his way through all the links. He could be clicking-through before the pages finish loading. But, then, the person would have had to have been at your site before. You would have had plenty of chances to "fish" for that information before.

...All supposition, on my part...

Posted by Adam Wilbert (Member # 1184) on 02-13-2005, 11:27 PM:

Randy,

what if, like me, your customer is surfing multiple sites at a time and it takes them an excessively long time to return to your page to click to the next. Then your site would be downsampling content for no particular reason. ??? I'm sure there is probably a way to "ping" your viewer without resorting to something as arbitrary as user response time.

I must only visit reputable web sites as I never have a problem with java/flash etc. But here are a couple of my peeves:
Sites that have alot of garbage on their sign-in page (like my bank) that takes a while to load before my browser will auto-populate the user name and password fields. I like the way Ebay does it, with a linkable login page that has minimal graphics.
Thanks to this upstanding forum, I can't visit many other "anonymous" forums wihtout cringing at all of the "hey, yo. A'ight I probly no wuz your prollem" lingo. If it wasn't for film-tech, i'd assume that everyone on the web was 9. Thats not really a design problem though, just a societal issue.
I do like when websites that I visit often have a feature to alter the color scheme. I don't know why though...

If brad is asking because there are changes in the works for F-T, I'd only ask for more graemlins. Such as MPAA ratings graemlins, for rating the joke forum and elsewhere, and a star and half-star graemlin, for movie reviews. That way instead of saying "three and a half stars!" we could begin posts with

Posted by Mark J. Marshall (Member # 1409) on 02-14-2005, 01:02 AM:

You guys complain too much. Use Firefox, and add the "Ad Block" extension. You can right click on any advert on a page, and select "Ad Block Image", and you'll get a pop up box, where you can see where the image came from. It's usually a server like "myads.ads.com/ads/a/ss/s3mim3..." Change it to "*.ads.com/*" and click ok, and *POOF* all those ads disappear forever. Works with some flash ads too. That together with Firefox's built in popup blocker my web surfing experience practically ad free.

Other than that, as a web designer, and programmer, there is only one thing that really annoys me. Any web site that REQUIRES the client to use certain software in order to work. For example, any site that REQUIRES Internet Explorer to work, or any site that REQUIRES Java to work. There's no need at all to box yourself into a corner when you design a web site, but idiots do it all the time, and it does annoy me.

[ 02-14-2005, 10:19 AM: Message edited by: Mark J. Marshall ]

Posted by Brian Michael Weidemann (Member # 2243) on 02-14-2005, 02:52 AM:

One little pet peeve of mine is when sites do fancy little adjustments like changing the color of the scroll bar. Not everyone has a mouse with a scroll-wheel, and some people have to actually SEE the scroll bar without having to LOOK for it.

I have a scroll-wheel mouse now, but I don't always use it. Also, long pages that reduce the scroll button to shorter than it is wide; like many blog sites. Do we really need to see the last 100 entries on the front page?

Posted by Scott Norwood (Member # 30) on 02-14-2005, 03:55 AM:

Another one: any web site (usually of the news/"magazine" variety) which doesn't show complete articles on a single page but, instead, forces one to click through to a new page every few paragraphs. Stupid, especially if one wants to print the content for offline reading (not something that I usually do, but still annoying)!

Posted by Mark J. Marshall (Member # 1409) on 02-14-2005, 10:23 AM:

Actually, what annoys me more than a web site that requires IE, is a salesman that shows up at my company and tries to sell us their fabulous new state of the art web based service - which was designed to work only with IE.

Posted by Ian Price (Member # 14) on 02-14-2005, 12:53 PM:

If your web site has a lot of photos to look at and you can click on a thumbnail to look a big photo, please put in a forward and back navigation buttons so that you don't have to click back to the thumbnails to look at the next photo and then the next photo opens in yet another window. I just want to click thorough the photos like turning the page in a photo album.

Posted by Jason Burroughs (Member # 68) on 02-14-2005, 01:07 PM:

Personally, I dislike websites hijacked by the MPAA (not that I condone pirating):

Link

Though the parody page is pretty good:

Link

Posted by Chris Hipp (Member # 1788) on 02-14-2005, 03:20 PM:

I hate sites with a black background and a non white font color.

Posted by Brian Michael Weidemann (Member # 2243) on 02-14-2005, 08:55 PM:

quote: Ian Price
so that you don't have to click back to the thumbnails to look at the next photo and then the next photo opens in yet another window.

Actually, ANY page that automatically opens its links into new windows; these bug me, especially when the links are just to new pages on the same site and not external. Every browser has an Open In New Window option, and I'd rather control my own browsing habits and how many windows I have open.

Posted by Randy Stankey (Member # 64) on 02-14-2005, 10:55 PM:

Brain,

If you use Firefox, try this little trick!

Edit (or create) your "userContent.css" file to contain the following:

[code]
/* Change cursor for links that open in new window */
:link[target="_blank"], :visited[target="_blank"],
:link[target="_new"], :visited[target="_new"] {
cursor: crosshair;
}
[/code]

As you can see, links that open into a new window will change the cursor to a "crosshair" when you roll over them with the mouse.

The same goes for links that activate Javascript:

[code]
/* Change cursor for JavaScript links */
a[href^="javascript:"] {
cursor: move;
[/code]

Activate HTTP Pipelining. (Which is off by default.)
Edit or create your "User.js" file to contain:

[code]
// Enable pipelining:
user_pref("network.http.pipelining", true);
user_pref("network.http.proxy.pipelining", true);
user_pref("network.http.pipelining.maxrequests", 100);
[/code]

And, finally, if you want to block ads FOREVER without need of "Adblock" extension, edit or create your "userContent.css" file to contain:

CLICK HERE for a really long text file that's too long to display on this page.

Posted by Adam Wilbert (Member # 1184) on 02-14-2005, 10:55 PM:

I wish there were an option in Firefox (and perhaps there is) to have the browser intercept "open in new window" links and open them in new tabs instead.

Posted by Randy Stankey (Member # 64) on 02-14-2005, 11:04 PM:

Adam,

There IS a way to do that...

CLICK!

Posted by Don Cross (Member # 2980) on 02-17-2005, 01:56 AM:

Please feel welcome to borrow this idea Brad...

How about a thread for "best of" websites, possibly with links if permitted?

If someone here were to create their own site which would you prefer: Dreamweaver, the Windows equivilant, or something else?